Salesforce Debuts Lightning Experience; New Version Of Sales Cloud

Published: August 25, 2015

Salesforce unveiled the Salesforce Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud, an extension of its Salesforce1 platform designed to enable salespeople to build their own pipelines and drive their own campaigns in an easy-to-use interface. The company also said its Sales Cloud product was completely rebuilt to incorporate the new Lightning Experience and Lightning Design System.

“This empowers reps,” said Sara Varni, Senior VP of Marketing for Salesforce Sales. Varni also noted that Salesforce customers demand ease of use and customization based on their needs.

“People want apps that help them do their job better,” Varni said. “[They want] clean modern user experiences. They are demanding in their consumer life, as well as their work and enterprise life.”

Sales Cloud is the first Salesforce product line to use the new suite of tools. The company plans to continue expanding the Lightning Experience to its other product lines, including Marketing Cloud. Varni characterized it as a “multi-year journey to roll out” additional components throughout its product set.

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“Salesforce Lightning allows for a much wider variety of UI components, and it has the potential to power easier-to-use, more engaging and more productive customer-facing applications for daily users within and outside the enterprise,” said Bo Lykkegaard, Research Director and Associate VP of Enterprise Applications for IDC, in a statement.

Salesforce Lightning combines the new Lightning Experience and the new Lightning Design System with its previously-released Lightning Components and Lightning App Builder, which came out last year. Salespeople can use it across any device — desktop, tablet and mobile devices — and customize it to their specific needs.

The Design System is described by the company as “a how-to manual for Salesforce developers, enabling any developer or partner to build beautiful components that work with Salesforce on every device and operating system.” It leverages Salesforce’s style guides and CSS.

The new product aims to enhance the entire look and functionality of the Sales Cloud product and includes features such as:

  • A new home page with aggregated information;
  • A “pipeline board” that visually represents all active deals with drag-and-drop functionality;
  • An “activity feed” that enables sales reps to see all activity within specific deals and prompts them on next steps; and
  • Dashboard customization capabilities.

In addition, the App Builder and AppExchange can be used by developers to build additional apps that integrate with the new Sales Cloud.

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